


In Time

by Vagab0nd



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Deadlock McCree, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, F/M, Hanzo is an asshole, M/M, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Plot-centric, Robin Hood McCree, Science Fiction, Slow Burn, Timers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-27
Updated: 2017-01-12
Packaged: 2018-09-12 18:10:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9083668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vagab0nd/pseuds/Vagab0nd
Summary: “All current forms of legal tender collected by the government have been eliminated. Paper and coin are no longer considered valid currency in any and all societies outside of personal. Any businesses caught using dollars, pesos, euros or anything related will be persecuted and four months will be taken off their clock. Time is what will replace these forms of payment.”“What happens if you run out of time?” He asked, clutching his bare forearm. It was a stupid question, he'd think in hindsight.“Jesse…” she whispered, the red numbers on her wrist counting down steadily. “You die.”





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> A few notes before we begin: 
> 
> \- The prologue is the only section of this story told from the first person. The chapters will be in 3rd person, mostly from McCree's perspective, but perhaps switching to others as the story advances.
> 
> \- THIS IS SLOW BURN. I will be focusing on world-building and setting up a good plot line before McHanzo even starts happening. Rest assured it'll definitely happen, but not right away. There will be sexual content later on, I promise! But I've read too many stories where the Cowboy and Ninja meet and then one or the other straight up goes WHOMP onto their knees and I don't wanna do that today.
> 
> \- This story is not finished, but I know how it will go and what points it will follow. I aim to finish it at approximately 14 chapters.
> 
> \- World loosely based on the 2011 movie "In Time", starring Justin Timberlake. Yeah, that movie was real bad. Let's fix it, shall we?

When I was younger, there was no room on the roads. Now I know what you’re thinking – Santa Fe’s always had room, middle’a New Mexico don’t got much to offer. But when I say no room… I mean not an inch.

My friends and I would get to school by walking, even out from the country, because it was faster than driving. Even biking was useless due to the overabundance of cars that would get in the way, their drivers rude and uncaring to stranger’s needs, and you would either crash into someone’s rear end or get stuck going nowhere. I never really questioned the mass of people on the roads at any time, nor did I ever hear the term “Rush Hour.” That was just every day. We accepted it and moved on. Our car laid untouched in our garage for years – my dad wouldn’t get rid of her, even if we had no use for her anymore. A collector’s item, he called it. I reckon if I had sold it, he wouldn’t’ve noticed. He was too drunk.

My Mama explained to me when I was eight or nine that it was because we had too many people in the world to fit on the roads. I had come home another day smelling of gas and dirt, black sludge crowding my nostrils, and she gave me a bandana to cover my face with so I could breathe properly. Overpopulation didn’t seem like no problem to me, and a little extra waiting never hurt anyone, but as I got older I realized that a little bit of “being crowded” also meant a little bit…. Or a lot of pollution, as well as a lot less room to grow the food we needed to power those pollutants. We were trying to raise animals in the little land we had, some chickens and a horse, but we were relatively well off then. Poverty rates rose faster from 2075 to 2080 than anyone had ever seen. No one knew what to do. 

Mama bought me a gun few months later, a real tame one, just to keep on me for safety’s sake. People had taken it upon themselves to control others, and mass shootings became something of an expectation. I was one of the late ones to be pulled out of school because I knew how to fight for my head, but Mama could only take so much and Dad couldn’t take nothin’, so it was just the three of us against everyone else for a good long time until the Government… Pulled together, or so the history books’ll tell ya.

You had to be twenty-five to be pulled into a tier without decision, so I don’t know every detail on a personal level, only second-hand. I was only 10 when they issued mandatory doctor’s visits, free of charge. The people suddenly had no choice. It was worldwide. I heard there were other consequences – in Russia you were supposedly just killed if you said no – but in Santa Fe, you went to the doctor’s or your taxes went up tenfold. Naturally, no one really refused, but they weren’t happy about it and they didn’t know why it was happening. The visit was, as they told us, for tracking who we were as people, as a nation. How we ranked, where we were headed. At the end of the day you got injected with what they vaguely described as an electronic passport. I didn’t know what they could possibly mean, then. 

You would be at the testing places all day – every doctor was enlisted, every scientist and neurologist and medical student put to the grind. You took brain tests, blood tests, hand-eye tests, gave them all your information, where you worked, where you were schooled, if you had family, until they had drained every last tidbit of information from you and stored it in the cloud, and they were infuriatingly unclear as to why. Mama didn’t worry, since she had helped build the guns we protected ourselves with, had a say in the house we lived in and knew everything about the prosthetic leg I walked upon. A Jack of All Trades, sharp as a tack, she was. If the tests had been for passing, she would for sure come out on top. Dad was more of a fighter. In the last few years he hadn’t been, but I knew he was somewhere deep down.

Not too long after Testing Day, Mama was woken up in the middle of the night from pain. She mentioned later it had started in her wrist, gone up to her elbow and had felt red-hot, like a lightning bolt upon her forearm. All we could see on her wrist were the numbers. 99:364:23:16. The digits in the right column were counting down. My father woke not a minute later, his arm showing the numbers too. They were red. A timer. 

2:364:23:57. 2 years, 364 days, 23 hours, 57 seconds. 56.

My arm didn’t have anything on it.

It was an early day, the sun barely over the horizon, and there were more cars out early on the block in front of our home than I had ever seen this early. They were honking and hollerin’ like nobody’s business, and I fed the chickens with my bandana over my nose as I wondered why I didn’t see any red on my arm yet. Maybe I was a late bloomer, I supposed. Dad’s was far shorter than Mama’s, so maybe mine was just that low. So low I couldn’t see it. As I headed back inside, I immediately heard Mama’s cries like a sharp knife to my heart. I ran in to see her shaking, and Dad had his beer again. Both were looking at their arms as if they wanted to chop them off. The television kept going, uncaring as it was, and twisted the knife in my chest until I couldn’t breathe.

“Testing is complete.” Blared the anonymous announcer. She was faintly British and uncaring. An android. “Prepare for separation. If you have more than three years on your clock, you are part of the high tier. You have more utility, a higher IQ, or are more important in society for the long run. If you have less than this, you are part of the low tier. I am sorry to say that you did not pass the tests that we sent out, and cannot be utilized in high tier. All individuals under the age of twenty five will be placed where the majority of all immediate family are placed. If there is an even split, a choice should be made as soon as possible about who you will stay with for the rest of your life.

“All current forms of legal tender collected by the government have been eliminated. Paper and coin are no longer considered valid currency in any and all societies outside of personal. Any businesses caught using dollars, pesos, euros or anything related will be persecuted and four months will be taken off their clock. Time is what will replace these forms of payment.”

My throat closed up as I looked again at my parent’s arms. Dad’s was bleeding. He had started clawing at it in a vain attempt to change something, anything. Mama stared, tears dripping down her sweet cheeks. I didn’t get to hear immediately what the television was saying next because I was trying to stop the blood with the kitchen towel. Dad was writhing in agony, and I am sure that it is not because of what he did to himself. He and I knew well that he had taken my mother for granted, and he was just realizing it now. All the years that he could have healed himself with her by his side, and even if he did fix it right off, he had no time left with her.

After a moment, I could hear again. The separation would begin in four hours. Your timer would be scanned and you would be placed in a different time zone. There were no longer countries, simply a unit government. This had been planned to a T. You paid with your time, and you lived for your time. If you were important, you had more time to share. I guess when you ran out of time, you were poor. It worked as a recognized unit of measurement.

Three and a half hours later we were being scanned, millions of thoughts scattered within my brain. I couldn’t decide who to stay with. My Mama and I were close, but from the sounds of it, she wasn’t gonna need me in the high tier, not now. She had a job guaranteed, a life to live, and I could hold her down. She told me I wouldn’t, I could never, but even if I was a selfish teen I still wondered. 

Dad was someone who needed most. Who was still stumbling along his own walk. He loved me all the same, just showed it differently. He would fall, and we could both get back up. He wouldn’t have Mama… But he could have me, couldn’t he? But was I ready for that? For such a challenge?

Mama got into the tram that would lead her to another life, and beckoned me with. I climbed on carefully, a leg hanging off. “Mama, what’ll happen if our timers run out? How do we refill?” I asked, ever so naïve. She shook, but her tear ducts had run dry.

“Jesse…” She whispered. “You die.”

I watched her ride into the new time zone as I held onto Dad, her kiss on my cheek and a promise on my lips.

I would see her again.


	2. 26 Years Later

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What's this? Another chapter?   
> Ye!!
> 
> I'm currently in Florida, auditioning for everything I can possibly get my hands on! It's a wild ride, and I'm writing at night before bed. Its soothing!
> 
> In this chapter, we drop first person and move on from an outsider perspective. I hope you like it!

26 years later   
  
The street is covered in grime and overpopulated with downtrodden folks on their last digit, a home for those with none as they beg for a moment of your time. The pollution in the air has begun to weigh even itself down, and it falls to the ground like an ashen film spread across every surface. In this area it didn't matter if you had cleaned your boots but half hour ago, they would be filthy within minutes. A shame.   
  
"A damn shame." Jesse McCree murmurs through his bandana, dusted and color worn from use. Every day that he steps onto the street he hopes the number of people will go down on every corner, that the Minute Men who had supposedly patrolled the place for who knows how long would finally pull themselves together and provide for their citizens, and every day he is newly disappointed. He isn't sure about the level of expectation he should be setting anymore - hadn't he learned not to hope in something that had long been extinct? The so called "police force" had been around for three or four years before dying out quicker than you could dial 911 pre-Separation, and now they were all but mascots for the unabashedly utilitarian government...  
  
He squints against the dull grey light of morning, filtering through the smog akin to a cheesecloth under mud. It looks about to rain, he thinks. Then again, so does every waking minute in Low Tier. He decides not to hope one way or another. Practice makes perfect.   
  
He purses his lips and starts to whistle, making sound for the sake of sound, before his air leaves his own system in a rush, the weight on his stomach unexpected. It disappears quickly, the little girl who had crashed into him apologising profusely, the dust on her fingers caked on in clumps as she folds them together, trying to rub it away. "Sorry mister." She says without looking at him, the expected childish twinkle in her eyes all but foggy when she looks up at him. He struck quite the imposing figure next to her tiny one - unruly long hair escaping from his bandana, spilling over his ears and eyes, one of his large hands covered in a leather glove, the other bare and shining, metal prosthetic. He stops her with the uncovered hand on her wrist, and she stares back up at him, terrified.   
  
"How much you got left?" He said, and to her surprise his brown eyes were warm, faint crows feet evidence of a small smile. He bends down a bit, and she notices the revolver at this side, neatly tucked into his pants but not hidden enough to escape a stranger's glimpse.   
  
Her little wrist turns slowly in his hand, sweat stains through dirt. 00:00:19:24. He tuts, shaking his head. "I tell you sweetpea, your parents ought to take better care of a princess like you." He's testing her, but she doesn't notice, a blush creeping up her cheeks. "Mama got less." she replies easily.   
  
She has at least one parent, he thinks to himself. Thank god. "Well then I 'spose she's doing the best she can." Jesse replies gently, tugging his bandana down so she can see his smile. "Say, can you keep a secret?"  
  
She swallows and nods, and he notices a single tear track down the side of her round face. It must have fallen some time before this, because even that is faint line covered in the desert's offering. Pressing a button on the prosthetic at his side, he offers up his own wrist. It lights up after a few flickers of red, showing her 00:12:11:14.   
  
She gasps softly- seeing more than one digit in the second column was a rarity in the low tier, and Jesse is well aware of this. He doesn't let her dwell, turning the cool metal over to press against her skin, their wrists in contact. Her timer begins to count up, and as she begins to smile he is sure he can spot a gap between her top teeth.   
  
He parts after a long moment, his timer reading just under three days before it flickers off from the metal plating. The little one is shaking with excitement, but he places his gloved finger against his lips before tugging the bandana back up. "Usually I keep my timer countin' down from twelve days, but I ain't never met a princess before. Couldn't help myself." He says, winking at her before standing back up. She doesn't move, holding her arm close to her.   
  
"You keep yourself safe." He says, reaching out to pat her head before ambling off. She follows him a few steps, stands for a long moment, and begins running in the opposite direction, her footsteps light on the road underneath. He has to calm his smile, a dry chuckle escaping his throat.  
  
It may not have been the best descision, he thought to himself after a good long while of walking. It didn't leave him much margin for error. But he felt better knowing that now she had at least enough time to be able to bathe.   
  
The bar he walked into was crowded, given it was just after the work rush, but he didn't fit in well. Cover charge was a full 10 hours, but he knew the bouncer - everyone else in there had not cared a bit they were giving that much away, but he didn't feel like risking it. Nodding at the guy as he walks in, he is immediately hit by the smell of alcohol and sweat accompanied by flashing lights and the sound of busy feet. It deosn't matter how full your clock is, the same things appeal for the rich that do for the poor.   
  
Jesse keeps his his head down, content to watch the sway of this way and that, waves in an ocean of bodies, the thumps of the base jarring his soul every beat. He yearns for the country again in times like these, aches for the ashen night sky and his own waves, long grass swishing in a gentle breeze over the hills. Industrial revolution is no real revolution now, it's an expected and constant movement. The farm he grew up on is probably a factory at this point... Mama would be disappointed.  
  
He circles the people in long, slow sweeps, careful to nod and bob his head to the odd man, woman and bang of the drum, but he's building profiles of the people he watches. There's Samantha, unhappily married 4 years, has a job as a high grade filter electrician for High Tier. Enjoys tennis, very interested in gemstones, owns an entire collection of pearls, amethysts and diamonds. Her timer is almost at a month, as she is saving to buy a bejeweled handbag. Another one, judging by the one already hanging off her arm.  
  
That man is Henry, a book smart, rather portly fellow, working for High Tier in the business district of providing printing, the paper industry on the rise following the collapse of most Internet providers (Henry learned to capitalise on failure early). He is drinking to celebrate, and positively spewing his stories at anyone he could hear.  His house is Low Tier despite how he has played his cards all these years, not that he could do any better all considering circumstances, but he regrets not pursuing law like his father had wanted, his life full of constant second choices and unrest since. He channels that deep hatred for the community he should not have to belong to by refusing to donate to any charitable cause - for why should he care -  and now his shoes even manage to stay shiny and polished like new, due to the fact that he prefers to pay the 2 hours for bus fare.  
  
People like those make Jesse's beard tickle, he thinks with a slightly cross glance, trying to look as if he is paying his own business.   
  
The gunshots went off as he scratched at his nose, the entire bar erupting into a chorus of screams accompanying the pre-existing base lines. "LISTEN UP!" Bellows a voice from the ceiling, a younger man wearing track pants perched atop the swinging chandelier. A scarf covers his face, and a bulky headpiece is attached to one ear. "THIS A HOLDUP A'SORTS!"   
  
A'sorts. Jesse sniffs. What did that even mean? This was a hold up, plain and simple. He sighs, cracking his neck slowly. The bar is progressively getting louder, and he finds that Samantha has moved right next to him. Another gunshot goes off.   
  
"HEY! WHAT'D I SAY?" The man shrieks again, and the crowd quiets. "GET ON YA KNEES, OFFER UP YA WRISTS, AND WE'LL BE OUT IN NO TIME."  
  
A voice emerges from the crowd after a split second. "Someone call the Minute Men!" They cry, and the man above laughs at the sentiment. "You may not be poor, babe - but you ain't High Tier. No one cares. Her first."  
  
A woman emerges from the crowd, her face also covered, grabbing the offender's wrist in her hand and forcing it down, placing her own right below. Jesse raises his eyebrows as the man beside the woman rises up to fight, his body a blur of motion before he's shot in the shoulder, a cry halting his movements as he drops to clutch at his bleeding body. Was it a miss? Any lower and he would be dead on the floor right now...  
  
Jesse is beginning to get irritated.  
  
Everyone is frozen for a split second before they begin to drop to their knees, offering up their arms for inspection. He can see Henry quivering in from where Jesse is very clearly standing.  
  
Another shot goes off and Jesse is at it in a flurry of movement, twisting his torso to wink at Samantha before he bends down to peck at her hand through his bandana, twisting her arm in a vice grip as she cries and shakes her head. He debates asking for her purse, knowing it'll snatch a good few weeks on the market, but decides against it. He is already on edge, the very much _unplanned_ shooting grating on his nerves, and he would like to escape as soon as possible - gunshots really seemed unnecessary considering they _had communicators -_  so he places his wrist under hers very quickly,  watching her struggle as he remains light-hearted. Oh please,  she's acting as if she needs all of this to live. Too bad, so sad, no bag. She would have to live off rations until next paycheck like more than 90% of Low Tier.   
  
His arm tingles as he separates, winking at her before he parts. He wishes he could give a quick quip, but his accent is... If anything, memorable, and he was never good at faking like his bosses were, especially this boss in particular, who continues hanging from the chandelier, watching. Samantha blubbers, her 12 hours she has left leaving her anxious for what is probably the first time in a long time.   
  
Henry is next, and Jesse decides to skip his usual decoration and take what he can get. The man puts up a good fight, trying his best to at least wrench the faded bandana from his captor's face, but the other man wins in the end, taking his prize to leave the unlucky sap with but 12 hours left.   
  
"Guess you're taking the long way home." Jesse can't help but say, the British accent he attempts far from perfect, but masking his heavy southern drawl at least a little bit. He steps out and away, making sure his light is still off on the shining prosthetic arm. He isn't sure how much time he has, but he's damn well gonna keep it. He begins to run.   
  
Several hours later, in a basement as full of soot and dust as you would find beneath a dozen chimneys, faceless men and women are trying to out-tower over each other standing around a table. There are no words, but the thoughts in between breaths are wild, untamed things, violent to uncaring, anxiety turning into pure stress, acceptance of an unknown fate.   
  
Jesse tongues his cigarillo as he boards his own train of thoughts, attention on a specific individual in the room. The man from the chandelier taps his own elbows, refusing to look up. His nosebleed has slowed down, but the clotted red has long passed the point of presentability. His eye is purple.   
  
"Well, Scout." Says one in the crowd, refusing to even attempt to mask the contempt in her voice. "Care to explain yourself? Not everyone here decided to attend to this operation you so _graciously_ offered to lead with your _years and years of experience_."  
  
Scout spits some blood onto the floor with a grimace, drawing his scrawny arms even closer in. "Didn't go that bad." he retorts, and the basement responds with gruffs and growls.  
  
"You shot two people." Snaps the woman from before, a smear of blood on her purple blouse, her black hair in a neat bun above her head. "We agreed we'd try and stay away from unnecessary violence, not purposefully cause it."  
  
"They were askin' for it!" Scout replies, finally looking up. "We need ta make sure we look large and in charge! The Deadclock gang is barely a name 'round these parts! We gotta strike fear into people's hearts somehow!"  
  
Jesse watches the exchange from the back of the room, leaning against a support beam and studying both of them. Everyone in Deadclock looks ridiculously young - as was the nature of their timers. As long as the numbers stayed high, you didn't age nearly as fast, and if it was high enough, you didn't age at all. He looked about his own age, but these two don't look a day over 25. He wondered distractedly if they were really older than he was. As it seemed, there were a few pretty old-looking people in here with young minds, too.   
  
"What I'm saying is that as long as we stay low on the radar, the Minute Men won't see us as a threat." The girl was saying, hand on the table in front of her, voice hushed in urgency. "We already know that our government is screwed up as it is, and the corruption favors _us_. But in order to keep profiting, we can only be a minor inconvenience. If people start _dying_ , you think that may not be more of an issue for them?"  
  
Scout doesn't have anything to say to that. Another man speaks up from the back, rather large with a balding head and deep Russian accent. "How much did we all collecting?" He asks gruffly, rolling up his sleeve to show a timer with quite a few days on it. After a few murmurs from the men and women who had attended, including Scout, the general consensus was that even after the unnecessary violence, it had gone pretty well.   
  
"McCree? How much you get?" Asks the man beside him, and they both had a deep chuckle at that. "Aw man, you know I ain't got a clue." Jesse replies, ducking his head, obviously a bit embarrassed. "Yeah, yeah." The other guy says sympathetically, patting him on the shoulder. "That prosthetic of yours really ought to get an upgrade. Whoever built it seriously screwed you over with the whole invisible timer thing."  
  
"Least I got an arm." Jesse replies with a shrug, and the conversation leads to what place they'll hit up next, when, and who would be going. Time is exchanged between those who hadn't been there, taken from those with more, so that everyone is even in the end - at least that's what they told one another. As soon as someone accused his buddy of housing their time in a bank, Jesse bailed. He wasn't in for another fight as he usually was, not today. He had somewhere to be.

* * *

The house at the bottom of the hill isn't the most pristine, or the most snazzy, or even the cleanest from the outside looking in. It is simply a house, two story, built for a family of five or six, perhaps seven if they squeezed. It isn't significant to anyone who does not know the address like Jesse does by heart.    
  
He opens the door with a whumph and is immediately greeted by the rich smell of meat cooking in the crockpot, putting a smile on his face. Reinhardt's making pulled pork, he remembers, walking into the kitchen to greet an older woman, Ana, who's arms are full holding three spoons, a bowl and a sleeping baby Pharah in her arms. Jesse quickly moves to scoop up the slumbering little girl, much to the delight of her mother, who gives him a grateful look and a tut. "You look like a movie villain with that getup." She chastises gently, her dark blue hijab shadowing her kind but firm expression as she sets the spoons in their rightful place.    
  
Jesse tugs his bandana off of his chin, his beard fluffing out from its confines and revealing his boyish grin. "Boo."   
  
Ana rolls her eyes, setting the utensils in a drawer to the left before reaching back to take the babe. "I would be more intimidated if that dust line of yours was less pronounced. Is the raccoon look 'in' these days?"   
  
Before Jesse can respond, another girl bursts into the room, her cheeks flushed as her pretty almond eyes shine with unshed tears. Pharah wakes up with a jolt, her little arms flying into the air to grab at whatever she can reach.    
  
"Jesse, thank god you're home." She says, her voice shaking. "Lena's got three minutes left."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you very much for reading!!

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on tumblr at BlackCoffeeBoys. tumblr. com .
> 
> Thank you so much for reading.


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